The Significance of Blank Spaces in Conrads Heart of Darkness?

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“True, by this time it was not a blank space any more … it had become a place of darkness.” (Heart of Darkness) Examine the significance of ‘blank spaces’ in THREE novels of the 19th and/or early 20th centuries.
The ellipsis in the titular quote refers to an important omission: “it [the blank space] had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over.”1 Conrad’s Marlow highlights the major significance of the ‘blank space’ at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries here - that of ignorance, but a challenging ignorance; a temptation to the empirical enthusiasts of the Victorian era and beyond. In this essay, the semantic challenge of the term ‘blank space’ will be addressed as the layers of meaning, in a 19th and 20th century context, are both relevant and important in discussing a topic of this kind: the perceived value of unexplored territories, the ‘uncivilised’ culture of the native inhabitants, the importance of nature as a barrier of progress and a combatant against technology, and the metaphorical and allegorical treatment of knowledge and ignorance.
The books chosen as reference are Erewhon by Samuel Butler2, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad3, and The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle4. Written in 1871, 1902 and 1912 respectively, these books were published at the end of an intense period of exploration ‘in which Britain, like most of Western Europe, spilled out to investigate, explore, colonise and exploit the rest of the world.’5 This upsurge in imperialism, coupled with the great scientific and technological advances of the Industrial Revolution a century before, drew even more attention to those undiscovered and unexplored areas of the world whose maps had been purged of fantastical topography, wiped clean, and ‘given over to the strict demands of “scientific” practice’.6 Professor Challenger’s first elaboration on his trip to South America imparts the lure of the unknown:
You are aware – or probably, in this half-educated age, you are not aware – that the country round some parts of the Amazon is still only partially explored, and that a great number of tributaries, some of them entirely uncharted, run into the main river. 7
The blank spaces upon the maps are seen as mysterious, and ultimately full of riches, be they scientific, economic or spiritual.

In Quest of Self in Heart of Darkness
In Conrad's Heart of Darkness Marlow comes to the Congo for experience and self in the ancient belief that a man is shaped by what he does, that character is formed by what happens to one. But surrounding all of man's efforts in the Congo is a presence: Kurtz listened to it and went mad, and Marlow recognizes it but refuses to listen, neutralizes the appeal of the unknown and survives Kurtz, who succumbed to the fascinating wilderness.

for a superman is realized in the quest of Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness. Marlow travels up the Congo River of Central Africa, driven by curiosity that morphs into raving monomania to find the premier Belgian ivory trader, Kurtz, a man seemingly distinguished from the hollow men of the Company, a man to make Nietzsche proud. But the average reader is not proud, as through Heart of Darkness Conrad displays for him the horror that lurks within his own soul through the flow of

authors. Two of the pioneer Modernist writers were Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot. The tendencies to question the incontestable beliefs embedded in all thinking and to focus on the inner self dominated. Old viewpoints were tossed aside to make way for the discovery of modern man's personal spirituality. Two works that are considered important forbears in the Modern period are T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
One attribute of Modernist writing is Experimentation

are left to themselves to interpret literature. This can become challenging with more difficult texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Fortunately, literary audiences are not abandoned to flounder in pieces such as this; active readers may look through many different lenses to see possible meanings in a work. For example, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be deciphered with a post-colonial, feminist, or archetypal mindset, or analyzed with Freudian psycho-analytic theory. The latter

reminisce about the many great men and ships that travelled on river to complete multiple voyages for trade. Marlow’s excursion parallels that journey of the hero. He enters the Congo as an innocent sailor and leaves as a changed man. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad creates an allegory and archetypal journey that consists of: the task, the journey, the initiation, the fall, and the unhealable wound created during the expedition.
In their recalling of the sailors, Charlie Marlow then remembers his

Nihilism in Heart of Darkness
In Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness (1899), Conrad explores existential nihilism, which defines a belief that the world is without meaning or purpose. Through Marlow, Conrad introduces a story for civilization, for those on board the Nellie that are unaware for their own meaninglessness. The voyage through the African Congo depicts the absurdity of man's existence and human ideals disintegrate in the immensity of the Jungle atmosphere. The ominous

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness does not explicitly deal with a struggle between war and peace: the conflict is a psychological, moral one; however, the text’s implications that society is a thin veil over our innate savagery, the darkness at the roots of Western civilization, reveals disturbing truths about the peaceful, orderly lives we take for granted. The key to understanding Conrad’s novella lies in ascertaining the metaphorical significance of the “heart of darkness,” a search which may

During the period when Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness was written, a common theme in literature was the testing of the moral life through actual experience. One could not realize an ethical principle without it being justified through the outcome of some practical conflict. This idea of testing morality through experience is exactly what is presented in Conrad's novel as Marlow's journey results in a trial that not only defines his own beliefs but allows him to make a rather pessimistic